Curious if Glenn Beck attended/graduated from college, checked Wiki- he's kinda f'ed up

[Beaverhausen]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glenn_Beck


Beck was born in Mount Vernon, Washington in February 1964, and raised a Roman Catholic. His mother and one of his brothers committed suicide and a sibling had a fatal heart attack.<5> He graduated from Sehome High School in Bellingham, Washington in 1982.

A 2007 profile in "LDS Living" magazine provides a comprehensive history of Beck's early life and career in radio, and states that his first significant exposure to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints came at age 18 when, after graduating from high school, he moved from Washington to Salt Lake City, Utah and shared an apartment with a former Mormon missionary. The article goes on to say that his first marriage ended in divorce at age 30 (1994). He and his second wife, Tania, joined the church in October 1999, partly at the urging of his eldest daughter, Mary, who has cerebral palsy.<6>

Beck was admitted to a special program for non-traditional students at Yale University while he was working for a New Haven-area radio station, having received at least one of his recommendations from Senator Joe Lieberman. During this time Beck took a single theology class, dropping out around the time of his divorce.<7>

Beck is a recovering alcoholic and drug addict.<8> He also has a diagnosis of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder.<9> He and his first wife divorced amid his struggle with substance abuse. Beck cites the help of Alcoholics Anonymous in his sobriety, and he eventually converted to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints,<10> which teaches against the consumption of alcohol.

By his first marriage, Beck has two teenage daughters, Hannah and Mary. With his second wife, Tania, he has two children, Raphe and Cheyenne. He is currently a resident of New Canaan, Connecticut, where, in May 2008, Beck applied for a special permit to place a six foot wall around his home citing "security concerns" and "angry audiences."<11>

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Why do people like this get so much power?

[Lost-in-FL]

1. Cause what doesn't kill you will make you stronger. nt

[lies and propaganda]

2. HES MORMON?!?!

omfg... seriously, I have no words.. it ALL makes sense now. Hes not actually crazy, hes a fucking mormon.

[Critters2]

3. Oh, yeah. He talks about it quite a bit. nt

[YOY]

5. Born Catholic...converted to Mormonism.

Most Catholics like myself who have a spiritual unawakening with mother church find a growing dislike of BS spewed by organized religion. Beck craved a faith with thrice the BS and a tenth the tradition to excuse that BS.

He converted to Mormonism and not even "cool Mormonism" as some Mormons prove themselves to be.

and no. No college degree whatsoever.

[elleng]

10. No, he's sick and crazy, which is prolly why he became a mormon.

[movonne]

24. By being sick and crazy you get hired for faux news....about 80% of

faux in sick and crazy...

[JVS]

15. Actually it makes no sense now. The mormons usually don't go in for raving lunacy.

I'm surprised a couple of elders haven't shown up and told him to quit acting like a fucking nut.

[grantcart]

25. Really? He is basically recycling the same bull Cleon Skousen did in th e50s

Beck considers Skousen his most important infludence.

[Fleshdancer]

4. Didn't Karl Rove's mom also commit suicide?

I can't imagine dealing with something like that myself. The faux psychologist in me can't help but wonder if this is a reason for so much anger. It's a sad situation regardless.

[elleng]

12. Rove learned that he was adopted, much to his surprise, as I recall.

I don't recall the rest, but there was a lot of messed up stuff in Rover's early years.

[Fleshdancer]

16. I thought he found out his father wasn't his bio father

:shrug:

Too much drama to keep up with I guess.

[elleng]

17. Right.

[Critters2]

6. His mother and a brother committed suicide? Wow.

That could mean that either he's inherited a genetic tendency toward mental illness, or that those losses have had a strong, detrimental effect on his mental health.

He should be getting help, not doing rabble rousing.

[sakabatou]

7. The ADHD makes sense.

[dgibby]

22. Bipolar woud me my best guess. n/t

[JDPriestly]

26. Bipolar. I've been saying that all along based on my experience with people who are bipolar.

When he feels an emotion, he feels it extremely strongly.

He also has abandonment issues which I have noticed in a couple of people I have known who are bipolar. His rants and his overly emotional behavior are so similar to people I have known who are very bipolar. It's uncanny.

I'm not a psychologist, but I happen to have known a couple of people who suffer from bipolar disorder. It is a terrible problem.

[quiet.american]

8. Why am I not surprised to see Lieberman's name come up? nt

[Juche]

9. Max Blumenthal recently wrote a book about this

Republican Gomorrah

http://www.amazon.com/Republican-Gomorrah-Inside-Movement-Shattered/dp/1568583982

He takes the psychological research of Erich Fromm on the connection between troubled personal lives and authoritarianism to show how the modern GOP has basically been coopted by people whose lives are a mess and who defend against this with a very reactionary, authoritarian form of mental gynmastics.

Glenn Beck is a giant mess for a variety of reasons

Bill O'Reilly was seriously abused as a child

Savage was abused as a child, and may secretly be gay and hate himself for it

Larry Craig was secretly gay and got caught in an airport restroom.

Limbaugh has trouble with women and a drug addiction problem

etc.

Now the rest of us have to suffer since these kinds of people run the GOP and the GOP media outlets. Their lives are a mess, and they deal with that by regressing to a fear driven, authoritarian mindset.

To clarify, there is nothing wrong with being gay or having problems. But if you deal with them the way people like Savage, Limbaugh or Beck have, then yes there is something deeply wrong with that.

[elleng]

13. John Dean looked at reps this way, citing someone's book/study to the same effect.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservatives_without_Conscience

The book makes extensive use of the research into right-wing authoritarianism of University of Manitoba Professor Robert Altemeyer.

[Hansel]

29. Their following was recruited from people with similar issues.

In the early 1980's, my neighbor and her friend were members of the Jesus Church in Minneapolis. The Jesus Church was basically a recruiting front for the Republican Party whose leadership instead claimed it was a born against Christian church. A fundamentalist church.

My neighbor and her friend were both single parents who were depressed because of very abusive relationships and that was how they got involved the church. Their mission was to proselytize to anyone they met whose bodies were possessed by Satan. How could they tell? Well they would be the alcohols, drug addicts, the mentally ill, people in abusive relationships, welfare recipients, people who were depressed over loss, etc. Basically the vulnerable.

I went with them to the church one day because they were harping on me about getting satan out of my life. I was a single mother in an abusive relationship. I went with them because I wanted to find out what made them act so batsh*t crazy when they talked about their religion. Why they literally saw satan in everything.

The service was a few minutes of singing, followed by a brief sermon rebuking Satan, followed by Republican candidates passing out campaign literature while the preachers told us we would all go to hell if we didn't vote for Republicans. That the Democrats were agents of Satan while the Republicans were our only saviors and would cast out and rebuke killers who would perform abortions, the gays and lesbians, and lazy people who lived off of the government.

[The Straight Story]

11. And he went to public school?? But I thought home schoolers were the problem?

:rofl:

[kestrel91316]

14. Mormon converts are in many cases much more "true-believing"

than those raised in The Church (TM).

[Critters2]

19. This is true of all converts. Even in the UCC.

I have parishioners who get pissed if I criticize the denomination. I was born and raised in the UCC, which makes me aware of both its flaws and its gifts. Converts don't tend to be that objective. In my progressive denomination, I find it chucklesome. In a more authoritarian tradition, it can be troubling.

[corpseratemedia]

18. some people (John Lennon) write amazing and cathartic music to deal with a mothers

early death.

And others create a psychotic "Tree of Revolution" and find secret ideologically incompatible messages on the walls of the buildings they work in.

[Critters2]

20. Suicide is different than other deaths.

Leaves more guilt, and questions. And the fact that both a parent and a brother committed suicide implies that there's a genetic link to mental illness.

This is a lot for a person to deal with. And he is NOT dealing with it well.

[thereismore]

21. Beck is emotionally unstable, that much is clear. he needs medication and he needs to be fired,

all in his best interest.

[AlienGirl]

23. Glenn Beck is NOT OKAY, and his "managers" are making him worse

Glenn Beck has been showing increasingly disturbed behavior, paranoia, delusional thinking processes, hypergraphia, and other signs of impending psychiatric breakdown. His "managers" or "handlers" at Fox are actually encouraging this and helping his illness along by feeding him flawed information that reinforces his delusions and by preventing him from normal reality-checking.

When he does break down, I place much of the blame for any harm that he does or that he suffers on the heads of the people at Fox who are (knowingly, imo) making a sick man sicker.

Tucker

[JDPriestly]

27. AlienGirl, yiou are, in my opinion, right.

Bipolar people have certain rhythms. They swing one way and then suddenly swing back. He won't keep up this manic phase forever. It's very sad.

[Union Yes]

31. Nailed it!

[lpbk2713]

28. Beck probably pays his ex extra to keep her quiet.

Otherwise we would have heard a lot of interesting history by now I'm sure.

Just like Limbaugh. He's been married three times and we don't hear anything

from his ex-wives. This is probably why OxyRush needs a $400 mill contract. :rofl:

[Union Yes]

30. A major symptom of bipolar- an ever increasing god like complex.

This god complex isn't found in every case of bipolar but it is prevelant in many cases. Each case of bipolar is very unique to the person.

In Beck's case..

Beck seems to think that he is going to become the de facto leader of the teabag movement.

He is taking on a god complex. Will he soon proclaim himself king?

Undiagnosed/untreated bipolar usually worsens with time.

Bipolar hijacks most of the most powerful human emotions. Depression, anxiety, happy/sad, anger, hate etc. Untreated bipolar often leads to a massive inferiority complex which further heightens these emotions.

When Beck loses it and starts balling on camera, IMO thats a classic example of an inability to control emotions. Which seems to define bipolar.

That dude needs major help.

[UTUSN]

32. To add to this background on BecKKK: Here's who he's been stealing ideas from: SKOUSEN

Whacked BecKKK's whacked hero:
One Willard Cleon Skousen, who worked/retired from the FBI and went on to be investigated by Miss HOOVER's FBI to the tune of 2,000 pages. I've always thought it was brilliant of LIMBOsevic that his main thrust in attempting to make Conservativism respectable when he first started was to ---purposefully, deliberately--- distance himself from the kooks, the BIRCHERs, the Trilateralists, etc. He would cut off all callers who started ranting on these topics. The same way he still cuts off those true followers who slip and let loose their true racist selves---------------INSTEAD of "disguising" themselves.


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http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/09/16/beck_skousen/index.html

Meet the man who changed Glenn Beck's life

Cleon Skousen was a right-wing crank whom even conservatives despised. Then Beck discovered him

By Alexander Zaitchik



.... But more interesting than the contents of "The 5,000 Year Leap," and more revealing for what it says about 912ers and the Glenn Beck Nation, is the book's author. W. Cleon Skousen was not a historian so much as a player in the history of the American far right; less a scholar of the republic than a threat to it. At least, that was the judgment of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, which maintained a file on Skousen for years that eventually totaled some 2,000 pages. Before he died in 2006 at the age of 92, Skousen's own Mormon church publicly distanced itself from the foundation that Skousen founded and that has published previous editions of "The 5,000 Year Leap."

As Beck knows, to focus solely on "The 5,000 Year Leap" is to sell the author short. When he died in 2006 at the age of 92, Skousen had authored more than a dozen books and pamphlets on the Red Menace, New World Order conspiracy, Christian child rearing, and Mormon end-times prophecy. It is a body of work that does much to explain Glenn Beck's bizarre conspiratorial mash-up of recent months, which decries a new darkness at noon and finds strange symbols carefully coded in the retired lobby art of Rockefeller Center. It also suggests that the modern base of the Republican Party is headed to a very strange place. ....

...The city's ultraconservative mayor, J. Bracken Lee, fired him in 1960 for excessive zeal in raiding private clubs where the Mormon elite enjoyed their cards. "Skousen conducted his office as Chief of Police in exactly the same manner in which the Communists operate their government," Lee wrote to a friend explaining his firing of Skousen. The man is a master of half-truths. In at least three instances I have proven him to be a liar. He is a very dangerous man (and) one of the greatest spenders of public funds of anyone who ever served in any capacity in Salt Lake City government." ....

...Skousen laid low for much of the '60s. But he reemerged at the end of the decade peddling a new and improved conspiracy that merged left with right: the global capitalist mega-plot of the "dynastic rich." Families like the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds, Skousen now believed, used left forces -- from Ho Chi Minh to the American civil rights movement -- to serve their own power. ....

"Skousen's personal position," wrote a dismayed Quigley, "seems to me perilously close to the 'exclusive uniformity' which I see in Nazism and in the Radical Right in this country. In fact, his position has echoes of the original Nazi 25-point plan." ....

Skousen may have been too extreme for the Quorum of the Twelve in Salt Lake City, but he soon found rehabilitation on the intellectual margins of Reagan's Washington. In 1980, Skousen was appointed to the newly founded Council for National Policy, a think tank that brought together leading religious conservatives and served as the unofficial brain trust of the new administration. At the Council, Skousen distinguished himself by becoming an early proponent of privatizing Social Security. He also formed relationships with other evangelical church leaders and aligned the LDS church with an increasingly religious GOP. ....

..."The Making of America." Besides bursting with factual errors, Skousen's book characterized African-American children as "pickaninnies" and described American slave owners as the "worst victims" of the slavery system. ....

"The 5,000 Year Leap" is not the only Skousen title to find new life on the 912 circuit. The president of the National Center for Constitutional Studies, Dr. Earl Taylor Jr., is currently touring the country offering daylong seminars to 912 chapters based on Skousen's "Making of America." For $25, participants will receive a bagged lunch and stories about America's religious Founders and their happy slaves. An ad for Taylor's "Making of America" seminar, currently featured on the Web site of the Tampa 912 Project, claims that Skousen's book is "considered a great masterpiece to Constitutional students (and is) the 'granddaddy' of all books on the United States Constitution."

Like so much declaimed by W. Cleon Skousen and his 21st century acolyte Glenn Beck, this last statement is fantasy. But it is also a profitable and popular one. In coming to terms with a movement that has an ever more tenuous relationship with accepted fact, we relearn that perennial lesson grasped even by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. Fantasies can have serious consequences.

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